Humour as a cure for the “pericolo roseo” in Marchesa Colombi’s fiction

Abstract

The transverse and persistent mechanisms of de-valuation and containment of women’s irony and humor, especially in terms of literary representation, has triggered some dynamics of exclusion and/or hierarchical inclusion in the cultural system of the humorous literary products by women writers.

This paper intends to let emerge, from the “galassia sommersa" (Arslan) of the Italian women literature, Marchesa Colombi’s novel Matrimonio in provincia (1885), exactly in the light of its fundamental humorous nature, so rare in the Italian women's fiction, especially in a historical tranche (the end of the XIXth century) where women writers, through decadent and realistic touches, paint fictional universes oppressed by patriarchal value systems, in relation to which the mild forms of women characters’ resistance are represented by suicidal acts or sad resignation to an unwanted fate.

On the contrary, the witty and sarcastic tone of Marchesa Colombi’s writing, its bitter and disturbing sense of humour, which attacks the reality and causes its grotesque reversal, is able to change so transgressively the canonical narrative system that the clichés of the traditional romantic literature are demolished and the symbolic and material representations of women in the collective unconscious are strongly questioned.